Media type for XHTML (was Re: The Future Of XHTML)

Shell Hung <shell@hkscript.com> wrote:

> > I'm surprised that W3C haven't seen this bug before,
> > but there you go. This also ties in with the recent
> > problems outlined with the MIME type of XHTML -
> > personally I think a new one "text/xhtml" may be
> > needed, because it seems that XHTML is neither HTML or
> > XML at all.
> 
> Yes, I am agree, but I also believe that XHTML was developed for prepare
> the next generation, as the previous disscusion of "Content-Type of
> XHTML",
> I think "text/xhtml" is needed, but not necessary.

XHTML 1.0 REC says [1]:

  5.1 Internet Media Type

    As of the publication of this recommendation, the general recommended
    MIME labeling for XML-based applications has yet to be resolved.

There were extensive discussions about what should be the media type
for XHTML documents, and "text/xhtml" was among those proposals, but
we haven't reached consensus.  There were objections to lavel it as
"text/xml" or "application/xml", too.

Note that "XML Media Types" RFC [2] is now under revision [3], and
a new convention, using the suffix '+xml', is proposed for labeling
XML-based applications, e.g. application/mathml+xml and image/svg+xml.
We might reconsider an appropriate media type for XHTML in this context.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml1-20000126/#media
[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc376.txt
[3] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-murata-xml-06.txt

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Friday, 23 June 2000 14:40:37 UTC